journalism, sociology philip macgregor

Journalism, sociology and charisma 1

Journalism, Sociology

Philip MacGregor

Bournemouth University

Abstract

The study questions some of the attitudes towards framing journalism as a field of

study. It suggests that a strong vein of sociological method and apparatus informs the

scholarship and that one effect has been concept proliferation. Another is the removal of the

element of time and history from much of the study. Moreover the centrality of sociological

tends to reduce the scope of humanities, as opposed to science, in the approach, which is odd

considering journalism is steeped in opinion that and a variety of contexts and cultures. These

enshrine freedom of expression, ethical concerns on the nature of humanity, proper

government, and citizens‟ lifestyles. Starting with Popper‟s reflections on social science

method, the argument concludes with some suggestions to bring narrative into stronger focus,

suggesting Ricoeur as a way in to find new arguments. The proposals are tentative and

inevitably simplify an extremely complex issue in the weave of critical thought as the study

of journalism evolves.

Introduction


The following observations may or may not apply to studies of Arab media and scholarship

on the region. It is worth questioning whether the quantitative „number crunching‟ approach to the

study of Arab media is prevalent as it is in the west. At the International Conference in Cairo covering

50 years of international research (2011) the review of Pakistani scholarship, for example, highlighted

many themes and distribution of methods typical elsewhere. Effects studies, and content analysis were

dominant, and the most popular theories were agenda setting and frame theory. “Scientific „ method

were reported as the only reliable method for research.

Furthermore at the conference, the missing factor of history in studies of global news stressed

by Thussu were targeted at all scholarship. At any rate the following remarks, which are a plea for

more qualitative, descriptive and historical work, apply anywhere – and perhaps there are signs that

the straightjacket of sociology is not so tight outside Europe. The descriptive qualitative work telling

the story of citizen journalism in the region (Hamdy 2010) is one example – and doubtless there are

many more.Peggy

05/12/2011

Whatever text you look at in journalism research, you are likely to find either direct

reference to a sociologist, or to a theory derived in some respect from a fragment of the

discipline founded by Comte, Spencer, Durkheim and Weber. It is a supposition that the

concepts and approaches of this discipline have infiltrated many analytical procedures by

which writers unravel the impacts and identity of the large body of communicators called

journalists. Many of the luminary names in journalism studies include the word in the titles of

essays and books, for example those of Philip Schlesinger, Jeremy Tunstall, Michael

Schudson, and key Herbert Gans. Very few voices can be heard of dissent from the

theoretical areas enclosed by the discipline. Social science is part of the unconscious

undertow of western critical study. Journalism studies as a university discipline goes back


about 50 years perhaps, taken globally, and of course it would have been struggling at first to

establish its credentials as a field with proper procedures, findings and general integrity. The

wish to differentiate itself from journalism proper and its own arm of commentary, probably

fuelled this desire to find a respectable academic distance from the object of study itself.

Sociology, it appears simply by observation, to have crept to the centre of the field. It

occupies it by default. It has the dignity of the word „science‟ and apparently offers a means

systematically to unravel journalism. Should we be suspicious? Were there options? What are

the effects of this partnership?

I shall suggest there are questionable results. The sociological terrain is itself

confused, controversial and multidimensional. Its methods may not be suited to the

communication of a form of expression that sometimes lends itself to literary, imaginative

and persuasive devices. Social science is dismissive of intangible communication qualities.

Sociology may well be a barbed choice. It has little sense of history. It often extracts

„situations‟ to analyse from tiny segments of time, partly estranged from context, (or at best

highly selective as to which elements of context it will acknowledge), and it often aims

towards a schematic, a-historical knowledge. It seeks to uncover articulated systems, finding

mechanistic cause relations in social processes, whatever those processes may mean. It

isolates artificial existence of points of action that interrelate with other selected and

subjectively defined points of action, which it will seek to declare as providing evidence for

objective principles inscribed with invariability and transcendence. As Islam (2002) points

out, sociology is a generalizing discipline. When applied to journalism, it is extremely

questionable how effective these generalizations are, how applicable to situations across

contexts such as nations, or across time. Time is often the missing factor.

What is at stake here is the nature of a discipline, which Robert Post (2009) defines

not just as a body of knowledge, but also as “a set of practices by which that knowledge is


acquired, confirmed implemented, preserved and reproduced.” Disciplines are the point at

which these practices are institutionalized and of course that happens almost exclusively in

universities and the disciplinary publications arising from them. They guard and disseminate

disciplinary norms. There is considerable uniformity across universities. As a newcomer,

journalism has been concerned with finding a normative structure for its discipline, nudging

and nestling as it does beside other branches of media and communication studies. It could

and perhaps should, have held more closely to the humanities agenda, which, as Post (2009)

observes must “gratify needs for human meaning, understanding and cooperation that are

perennially diffuse and unsettled” (p176). Humanities research in the words of Terry

Eagleton (1984) should maintain a “general humanistic responsibility for the culture as a

whole.”

One of the first things the sociological method of study which has been borrowed by

journalism overlooks is the internal flaws within the discipline of sociology itself. How valid

is it to rely on the tenets of a body of academics already unsure of the fate or future of their

discipline? The vogue for functionalism, which has left a residue in several aspects of

journalism studies including some of the market models, is now derided by sociologists on

many counts, including its false analogies with Darwinian biology, its circularity, and so on.

Sociology always had an aura of a fringe discipline, concerned with matters that others

ignored (Islam, 2002). Core concerns must be its restriction in time and space, its shortage of

means to grapple with narratives and history, or with sensibilities outside a mechanistic

purview based on systems. By contrast, history and narrative are intrinsic to journalism in the

way it presents its knowledge to the world at large. It struggles, of course, and these problems

are proper objects of study, and we need to know why public communication is subject to

skew, spin and other limitations. How to approach those limitations, how to inscribe them


into forms of words, and how to integrate those gaps with knowledge gained from other

disciplines – philosophy, psychology, linguistics and literature, for example - is the problem.

Criticisms

Now to look at some criticisms of sociology more closely. A trenchant analyst was

Karl Popper who in 1957 examined the security of sociological knowledge. His unswerving

presentation of a point of a certain point of view reflects a body of opinion and examine

premises that might make uncomfortable reading for those writing on journalism.

His critique cites many analogies of social science with physical sciences, and

proposes they are fallacies: Whereas in physics, situations can be isolated, and experiments

repeated without distortion of a wider reality, “in social life, the same old factors in new

arrangements are never the same old factors.” If nothing can repeat itself precisely in social

life, the actually of every situation is new, he says.

Secondly, social structures are entirely different from physical structures. “In science,

the history of a structure contributes nothing to its behavior.” (p19) The former are holistic,

more than the sum of their parts so that “social structures cannot be explained as

combinations of their parts.” In effect, no situation repeats itself in life so to seek the

objective existence of structures is to work on a false premise. Any generalizing process is

false. Perhaps Popper betrays his time in a further anti objectivity argument where he

suggests there will always be an influence of the predictions on the predicted event in the

social sphere. He says the fact of the influence of a social science finding on subsequent

social development is an exact proof of its non objectivity. Sixty years on, this argument is

now increasingly applied to science too but is no less valid for that.


In Popper‟s argument, everything studied sociologically is contingent to local place,

local era (modern or feudal etc) and, unlike science, there is no conformity over time of any

one rule or principle. He does admit the possibility of cause and effect in social affairs but

crucially these do not transfer across eras and have no claim to universality or therefore to

science. In terms of method, he is no less scathing. The essence of sociology is qualitative, he

asserts. It is debatable how many current researchers would properly accept this limitation.

His argument is simple – you cannot formulate social change relationships in quantitative

terms in the same way as you can chart quantitative change in physics – rates of change in

technology and innovation, for example, which are a branch of journalism studies, would fail

on these grounds and the same kind of arguments would apply to „tabloidisation‟ or indeed

the whole moral panics thesis. Popper‟s examples are rates of „industrialization‟ and

„imperialism‟. aMuch current work on journalism is presented as quantitative, measuring just

these things such as rates of change in statistical ways. Sociology is at heart qualitative,

Popper‟s case runs, and can only operate by the use of „sympathetic imagination.‟ (p20). I

cannot conceive of many studies of journalism content in current journals that would admit

sympathetic imagination into their list of methods.

He continues with several arguments in this vein on method failures and the problem

of generalisation: “The most careful observation of one developing caterpillar will not help us

predict its transformation into another.” (p109), and ”We have no valid reason to expect of

any apparent repetition of a historical development that it will continue to run parallel to its

prototype.”

And finally: “ The hope more especially that we may one day find the laws of motion

of societies, just like Newton found the laws of motion in physical bodies, is nothing but the


result of these misunderstandings. Since there is no motion in society similar or analogous to

to the motion of physical bodies there can be no such laws.”

This encapsulates the problem of sociology that connects it to systems, underlying

articulated structures conceived often rather statically, or, if dynamically, as producing laws

or stereotypes of typical development. Brian Winston‟s (1997) analysis of technology

adoption posits just such a law, „the law of the suppression of radical technology‟, proposing

that emerging technologies are always implemented conservatively. In the field of online

journalism, David Domingo (2008) captures similar ideas in the notion of technological

„inertia‟ (note the pseudo scientific word taken from mechanics and motion in science) that

describe professional journalistic mindsets as they negotiate changes in their technology. The

revered sociologist Bourdieu reflects another version of the notion of the same residualism –

„habitus‟ in his field theory (field, another borrowed scientific term), used by Kunelius and

Ruusunoksa (2008) in their online journalism study of technological adoption in newsrooms.

Thus sociology seems to lure analysts of online media to attempt to find laws and

principles of adoption of technology – looking for precisely this quality of parallel

development, prediction for new situations yet to arise, and a sense of order. They strive to

find the persistence of essence within mutation, or an explanation of a repeating „cause‟ of

mutations across time and space.

Comparative journalism is subject to similar criticism – seeking regularities across

space and time. It is the nature of the regularities too that one needs to question. Their

„nature‟ is extremely controversial. Esser (2008)again, in his study of „soundbite‟ journalism

suggests the American-style short soundbite is gradually infiltrating German journalism

practices. Sociology dignifies these investigations, whereas in my view finding real and

consistent entities (such as a „soundbite‟) across even quite small cultural differences,such as


between Germany and England, leaves a sense of the arbitrary and contingent and poses real

questions as to whether these can realistically be isolated from one news context to another.

Hanitzsch (2007) points out quite fairly that journalism studies of professionalism are riddled

with perspectives that don‟t overlap. He acknowledges that the object of study is

multidimensional, that therefore selectivity is inevitable in doing research. That said, his own

work to build a meta map of journalism cultures is also paying homage to the God of

systems.

I would elaborate one of these elements particularly. Sociological concepts seem to

be endlessly divisible. By that I mean that they are infinite in number and nearly always

further reducible. McQuail (1997) describes an audience type for example as being both

„conversational‟ and „consultative‟. There is no limit to the potential descriptors of an

audience type when approached this way. A „fickle‟ audience might well give „moody

feedback‟ as opposed to a „restrained‟ or „silent‟ feedback (I am inventing). How are these

terms grounded? Researchers and research is bedeviled by concept proliferation and this is a

problem for research partly induced by sociology and its current dissasociative practices.

Bourdieu‟s field theory picked out already, provides another illustration. In the last

few years, journalism studies have started to employ it as a conceptual mould (e.g Couldry

2003, Benson 1998). Why was it picked up suddenly? Such a choice immediately detaches

those studies of online technological adoptions from any others not using that theory.

Endlessly re-slicing elements of theoretical positions leads to fragmentation and a profusion

of arguments based on different premises. It is preventing coherent disciplinary profiles.

It is fanciful to put too much emphasis on any one of the profusion of sociological

perspectives on the acquisition of knowledge. One can however note some interesting


parallels with the approach of Robert Merton, whose „middle range theory‟ is generally

acknowledged to carry much weight in U.S. sociological circles. Echoing my point above on

theory proliferation, this approach abandons grand social systems, substituting the use of

small grafts of hypothesis gleaned from everyday empirical experience or bits of hypotheses

segregated from larger theories. It thus allows segmentation of any wider theory. Meantime,

abandoning of any notion of essences, it undermines the expectation of consistency between

times and places. It enfranchises the parochial approach. Its downside is that it validates the

disconnect between one study and the next, and, in a sense, out with the baby goes the

bathwater – history, continuity and mutual connection between studies.

This perspective is a wing of the wider and contested notion of positivism, that

empirical approach that emphasizes scientific expectations that research should be replicable,

valid, and reliable. Undoubtedly positivism is a dominant approach for many modern studies

of journalism, commendable enough from its empirical standpoint, but problematic when it is

sewn rather randomly into whatever theory seems to meet the needs of a particular

researcher. Studies of online journalism seem beset by the problems of theory (e.g

Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009, Hanitzsch, 2007). Adoption of the internet into

newsrooms, as mentioned above, has many scholars‟ attention. (e.g. Bockzowski 2004,

Deuze 2004. Chung 2007 Karlsson 2011, Steensen, 2008, Fortunati et al, 2008 O‟Sullivan

Heinonen 2007). Positivist case studies and questionnaire surveys often form the method. The

theories seem troubled. The idea of adoption, its philosophical being, if you like, rarely takes

the foreground. On which side of the nominalist or realist divide does it lie? Very often, also,

the concepts used to define change stem from isolating „participatory features‟ (Karlsson

2011), such as „interactivity‟ (e.g Chung, 2007) or „multimedia‟ as definers of the novelty of

the so-called online medium. As Karlsson (2011) notes there is „no common ground‟ between

the definitions of interactivity (Kiousis, 2002, McMillan, 2002 cited in Karlsson 2011). These


controversial facets like interactivity are then connected to social values of our time like

equality and participation. But where did these „social facts‟ being studied come from – are

they inherent in the technologies, waiting to be exploited? What is the nature of their

existence? Are they just socially defined characteristics, no more than convenient categories

„obvious‟ to the researcher or participants? How does anyone derive these categories? How

do we know they are the right ones to privilege. And „adoption‟ itself: is it a descriptive

word, an evolution that happens piecemeal, or a process that flows along certain inherent pre-

ordained channels. Sometimes adoption is rationalized as teleological, as Marc Deuze

implies with his talk of „ideal types‟. Is it just a word or is the adoption of technology

something ordained, out there but nascent, a Platonic idea incarnated at particular historical

moments, a sort of philosophical universal?the of its defining entities I should perhaps

elaborate a little more too on the entrapment within contemporary mindsets that these a

historical perspectives can take. Democracy – often the western neo liberal versions –

participation, and equality of access to information form an idealistic pivot to much study.

Being of our time, such normative concepts are almost inevitably convenient to give critical

purchase to the field. But it matters if these constructs become too universal. There are other

forms of government, other ways of doing things and other values and arguments that can be

lost unless we retain a method of recourse to the historical referent as a source of terms and

cultures of understanding. Even if they are at odds with 21st century sensibilities.

Whatever the answer, theory building, renewal and extension are highly valued and

are pivotal to gaining academic publication. In researchers‟ hands this becomes a means to

obfuscate and drown meanings in a sea of specialist concepts. Sociology is a wonderful arena

to multiply theories and extensions in this academic game. Nobody can declare its limits, and


no imagined cause and effect relation is out of bounds, often based on concepts defined in a

particular research paper.

Pierre Sorlin (1994) puts another slant on the minimalist approach – claiming that the

latter-day vogue for desconstructionism – is linked to the end of grand narratives. In this

view, any topic is considered too large to think about as a whole and „piecemeal‟ study is the

way forward. Discontinuity and fragmentation have become worthy objects of attention built

into the fabric of postmodern territory (p11).

Popper‟s summaries of arguments, on which these discussions are based so far, were

supplemented a few years later by Richard Feynman, in three public lectures of 1963.

Feynman is a pure scientist and mathematician. His polemical criticisms seem still pertinent,

especially as social science wishes to emulate exactitude of science. In The Meaning of it All,

Feynman takes to task the fallacies of „This Scientific Age‟. Under special scrutiny are

method and proof. Following a fairly standard section on the temptation to equate correlation

and cause, he goes on to discuss how tempting it is to calculate the probability of an event

occurring after it has occurred. If we keep in mind those types of journalism research that

collect „data‟, analyse it, and conclude with patterns and regularities from evidence, some

cautionary tales emerge. He points out that it is entirely wrong to discern a pattern (as any

form of law) from a single body of data unless that precise patterning possibility was

inscribed in the research design.(My italics) His example was from experiments with rats, a

cliché he would be unlikely to repeat today. What he cited was the example of these animals

that a fellow researcher made to go left or right at a „T‟ junction included in the experimental

apparatus. What his colleague was investigating was immaterial, but at the end , he noticed

that the rats seemed to alternate: first one left, second right, third left, fourth right, and so on.


The researcher wanted one in twenty odds of this, so he did a large number of cases. It

seemed to work, it was true….the rats behavior displayed this regularity. The researcher

rushed to Feynman and said: “Calculate the odds of that.” “It probably is less than one in

twenty but it doesn‟t count”, replied Feynman. It didn‟t make any sense to calculate after the

event. “You see you found the peculiarity, so you selected the peculiar case.” The only

scientific way to prove a regularity was to isolate this possibility of either left, or right as the

specific intention of the experiment. Only then would it be substantiated.

How many journalism studies really make one specific cause/effect relation the only

object of their work – and one moreover one that has been previously detected as a

possibility. I‟d suggest that very many of them work the exact opposite way, and suggest the

causal links as the conclusion to their wider initial study. Domingo, in his study of online

journalism in four Catalan newsrooms, concluded that the publisher that did not have an

offline enterprise (such as a newspaper or broadcasting station) was freer to innovate in the

direction of time lapsed news. One case study, no prior suspicion or hypothesis: was that

really a conclusion in any scientific sense. Yet the appeal to science litters journalism studies.

Esser is typical: “Any serious scientific discussion of tabloidization must therefore begin with

definitions, analytical indicators and conceptualisations.” (Esser, 1999)

Statistically, on Feynman‟s basis, Journalism studies do pretty badly too. Statistics is

not social science as such, but a branch of maths, so this point is just made in passing. It is

simply the sheer number of cases needed to reach tolerable accuracy. It is so inconvenient to

interview thousands of journalists, or question them, that most studies based on numbers

work with unsupportably large margins of error.

The risk of disconnect


So far I‟ve glanced at some critiques of social science, with some asides about the

conceptualizations of recent attempts in the study of journalism to gain credibility in

emulating associations and techniques of science. There are many assertions of the influence

of science. My main point is not really the quality of the research but the assumption about

the discipline that derives from its grounding in social sciences. A discipline‟s aim is to rise

above opinion, and to assert a distinct zone of expertise outside of politics and persuasion

found elsewhere, (Post 2009) but journalism studies may thereby have disconnected itself

from the nourishment of qualitative humanistic approaches that might actually allow it to talk

more directly to matters of public concern and less to those of abstract system building.

One way to gain continuity could be derived from awareness of ways of knowing left

to us from history. It is the longitudinal approach that facilitates meaningful cultural

understandings and critique of public communications. History can provide terms of

reference more general than sociological tenets that fall victim to a charge of disconnect, and

which thereby proscribes recourse to other evolutionary issues and questions. If humanities

are about maintaining “a general humanistic responsibility for the culture as a whole”

(Eagleton 1984, Cited in Post 2009) these duties and responsibilities are impoverished if too

far deprived of the critical perspectives over time.

Similarly engaging with the issues of disciplinarity and method, Judith Butler (2009)

asks:

“Can we think about how, under certain conditions, certain kinds of questions cannot

be posed, or rather, can only be framed and posed by breaking through a certain prohibition

that functions to condition and circumscribe the domain of the speakable.” (p777)


In this argument, these prohibitions stem at least in part from absence of the

dimension of the past, and even rejection of the past that grips research. Not all journalism

scholars fall for this and the political economists are especially deferent to a sense of the past,

and to them much work in the history of journalism is owed.

One should always consider what journalism texts purport to be. At their best, and it

is a multi-genre discipline – they encapsulate criticism, comment, persuasion, and literary

style, all of them communicative arts that belong firmly in the realm of the humanistic. If

sociological and social scientific approaches that privilege neutral schematic knowledge and

methods, and stress quantitative methods of research, where should stresses be changed? One

option is to raid or reflect other disciplines for examples and styles from more humanities

based disciplines.

Finally for theoretical renewal, many avenues might be proposed but I want to that

emphasise the importance of time and narrative. Complex though Ricoeur‟s his writings are,

perhaps they justify how we might allow more freedom into the critique of journalism. In the

first place, Ricoeur (1987) discusses the absolute intertwining of human understanding and

narrative, all depending on the sequential nature of stories, their delivery of meaning though

subordination to a sequence. You could not understand time without narrative, and vice versa.

The human being functions with the time dimension inscribed into all texts. This I can see as

a way to formulate a polemic against the sociological power. As explained, sociology is far

from diachronic and sequential: it segments and isolates analyses in frozen moments, it is

non-evolutionary in temperament, capturing segments of the present in its hypotheses. This is

graphically stated by Islam (2002):


“American sociology modeled itself on Compte who divided the

subject matter into the study of social static, meaning the structure and

function, and the study of “social dynamics”, meaning the study of change

, development and the comparative study of societies over time and space.

Sociology got bogged down with its numerous studies of the structure and

function but it never bothered to study change or social dynamics.

Although some have claimed that the study of change is built into the

functionalist theory, which dominated sociology for over thirty years, there

is very little evidence of that.” (Talk to the Bangladesh Sociological

Society)

This applies at two levels. One, that the historical side of elements of journalism are

more privileged, being essentially close to narrative, and second, that the narrative element of

journalistic texts themselves are given more attention. and space For example:

Journalism depends on narrative elements;

News about change is drama, as much as fact;

Actions and motives are its fabric;

Tragedy is a subtext, linked to emotions of fear

and pity;

Journalism is perhaps a form of rhetoric;

m from formalist schematization such as in the work of Propp ( ). He is on the right

lines though, looking at plot functions and so on, heroes and villains, things central to tabloid

journalism.


At least it enables confidence to approach topics like media effects with far less

inhibition than in regular communication studies. So this article is in one sense a call to

jettison some of the verbiage of sociology, such as hypotheses and laws. That might in the

first place allow more inter-comparability of journalism research, and allow families of

articles to talk more directly to each other if the limitations of pseudo-proofs and pseudo

structure were relaxed. If we let such descriptors as „habitus‟ and „inertia‟ to enter the

language, (and who knows what is next on the horizon?) they actually disguise a perfectly

respectable and uncontroversial idea of the persistence of the past in the present.

Turbulence and evolution

Now some of this approach may arouse considerable suspicion. Rejection of strict

„scientific‟ method and belief might correlate with Post‟s „charismatic‟ idea of disciplinary

actions, which he opposes to disciplinary authority (Post 2009). As he says: “At the heart of

this ongoing debate about the status of the humanities is the question of whether the authority

of humanities scholarship is to be regarded as disciplinary or instead as charismatic, like

artistic authority.“ (p261)

He bases this discussion on W. T. J. Mitchell‟s (1995) idea of „turbulence‟ at the

fringes of a discipline, incoherence that allows evolution and creativity. The significant point

here is that charismatic authority permits art and artistry into the discursive environment. This

is difficult ground for journalism, factual and organized as the product is supposed to be, and

even more, by inference, its study as a discipline. For academics, as Post asserts, artistic

success is suspect “since does not appear to depend on either reproducible methodological

competence or the approval of established organizations like universities.” (P760). Another

unwelcome consequence of this non-disciplinary authority, he believes, is that it allows

polemics to enter the field unchallenged, being freed of strict methodology.


All that aside, the notion of placing journalism studies in the debate about the place

and value of humanities at least allows the possibility of connection with imaginative

dimensions that Popper believes is intrinsic to social study. It legitimates grounding research

less emphatically within scientific traditions and methods thereby putting unnecessary strains

on writers.

Perhaps an example of the need to widen the frame of discussion of journalism, at

least in some quarters, can be taken with the issue of professionalism. The aim of the quest is

to find and describe a conditioned creature as a type, whose activity is prescribed by rules of

procedure and routine, and who has a behavior conditioned by a learned role. Norms and role

theories are a facet of „middle range‟ sociological theory. These role attributes encompass

newsgathering, interpretation and formulation of products and the defence of journalism in a

wider social setting. The object of the research is usually to establish the degree of

professionalisation according to certain criteria and often to discover how widespread certain

understandings are. They are associated often with concepts of „culture‟ (Hanitzsch 2007).

The founding studies of Wilhoit and Weaver set a trend in identifying professional roles and

descriptors. Again, standardization across space is the finding to be refuted or agreed by

theirs and subsequent studies. (Hanitzsch, 2007). So far so good. We are in the territory of

enlightenment, bureaucratic organization and assertions of instrumental rationalism – the

controversial field of modernity.

What is deleted from many of these studies and approaches, it might be said, is the

role of emotion (in the journalist), the roles of sympathy/empathy (for the interviewees),

imagination (for social consequences) and individuality (of style and treatment) that may lie

alongside or within these depersonalized role descriptors. In other words, the humanity and

social vision of the journalist, and the concomitant freedom to make unexpected choices and

sacrifices, is overlooked - all in the greater mission to deploy sociological concepts to


describe journalism as a system or within systems. True, sociology sets agency up as a

tension between individual and system, but this approach can be depersonalizing. Perhaps it

is necessary to seek a different reference framework, closer to the perceived world and

terminology of the journalists themselves. Considerable distance in this direction is travelled

by Hallin and Mancini (2004), who restore history and cultural factors to the analysis of

abstract journalism types. Indeed they overtly attack the talk of dependent and independent

variables and the imitation of natural science methods in communication research (Downey

and Stainer, 2010). They assert that it has little explanatory value and its localization makes it

fallible. Equally, one might draw further on cultural theorists in the tradition of Raymond

Williams, whose work captures soft edged concepts such as „structures of feeling‟ that belong

to different eras or writers. Role studies underestimate psychology, or the motivations for

resistance to social pressures. Paradoxically this notion of resistance, which I think is hugely

important in humanities studies, is very aptly put by Georg Simmel, one of the founders of

sociology:

Neitzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as

the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same

thing in the suppression of all competition – but in each of these the same

fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to

being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.”

(Simmel, 1903 cited in Wikipedia)

It is ironical, in terms of this argument, that such an emotive statement should come

from a sociological source. His last phrase seems close to capturing the numbing effects of

study by measurement. Other writers we might turn to more readily for a style of expression

are those of the Frankfurt School, whose work is suffused by humanistic critical judgment of

a qualitative kind. Even if their hostility to media needs modification, this does not make the


technique less acceptable, given its motive as a lament for mental and moral erosion of

human existence. Adorno is concerned to reassert possibilities of reconnecting with

psychological inspiration and health. This essentially literary and philosophical approach to

the study of media restores meaning to centre stage, and provides a terminology that

reconnects with feeling, at the same time provoking a stream of prescient insights.

This question of meaning is at issue. In history, according to Ricoeur (1986), the

temptation to look for causal laws or explanations in history is offset by another important

need – to establish interpretation. Could this also be applied to social science, that often tries

to isolate components that relate to each other in a causal and sequential way, but which have

little meaning outside their own terms of reference. Such approaches open the door to Post‟s

(2009) more charismatic form of the disciplinary study. Now in some ways, it could be

argued that the proliferation of theory and hypothesis in journalism studies is a sign of

turbulence, close to charismatic authority in itself. The field is already turbulent enough. On

the other hand, Journalism is a creative social form: its proponents work in creative relation

with their conventions and technologies, none more so than in social media and the

communication of momentous events such as we see around us now.

One under-acknowledged quality of journalism that could be emphasised is that of

aesthetics, affecting languages of text, sound and film. Aesthetics is among the first qualities

photographers and still picture editors seek in picture selection – aesthetics of drama, pose,

style mood and so on. For writers, the sonority of language as well as soundness of thought

distinguishes the best from the average. As to their content, despite the controversy of subject

matter and the dominant weight of criticism that journalism comes up against, the yardstick

behind much of the output is the notion of what it means to be human (Eagleton Cited in Post


2009). Nearly every section of a newspaper, barring perhaps the business sections, fits the

description of saying something about being human – sport, politics, entertainment. And this

includes modes of address and devices of communication. In consequence it can surely be

argued that the humanistic and literary virtues should be privileged in the study and

explanations of journalistic texts. Surely this humanistic endevour should be reflected more

in its scholarship. Qualitative and interpretative dimensions allow insight without

measurement, comment without scientific proof, patterns and affinities that are not born of

hypotheses and laws. That way the richness and the coherence of the field might be

improved, with closer connections to the past, with simpler language, and with a more

aesthetic and less sociological product.

In conclusion, this paper probably represents more of the negative sides of sociology

(and its effect on journalism) than the positive. Its early proponents like Weber avoided

claims to be working with a branch of science and stressed the importance of individuals,

agency and the chaos of reality. It all has a modern ring In it, there is plenty of room for

organic connections and relationships other than those of mechanism and cause. Those

dominant areas of sociology like institutionalism, commodification, cultural capital, and so

on, not to mention the residual persistence of functionalism, hold considerable sway in

journalism studies – and we should perhaps acknowledge this more readily, to avoid further

evacuation of meaning from the critical field that so many no:

There is no “objective” scientific analysis of culture… all

knowledge of cultural reality is always knowledge from particular

points of view …. An objective analysis of cultural events which

proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the

reduction of empirical reality to laws is meaningless…because ….the

knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality, but is

rather one of the various aids used by our minds for attaining this


end. (1897 ) Objectivity in Social Science... DOI:

10.1080/14616700902975087 “”

journalism, sociology philip macgregor

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